CentOS - Jun 2011 - CentOS 5 32bit and 3Tbyte drives

Has anyone tried to use these yet?

For hysterical raisons, my primary machine is CentOS5 32bit (up to date).

In the machine I have a SiI 3132 dual port SATA controller with port
multiplier.  Both ports are plugged into an external storage device
which presents 4 SATA disks on each port, for a total of 8 possible disks.

Currently I have 5*1Tb in there, configured as RAID5 via mdadm

I boot off an internal SATA disk; I don't see a need to change that.

But space is running out; I wondering if the new 3Tb disks would work
in this scenario; most importantly will 2.6.18-238.9.1.el5PAE see the
whole disk?  And also whether I need to be worried about 4Kbyte sectors.

These new disks are confusing me!

-- 

rgds
Stephen

On Saturday, June 18, 2011 10:00:25 PM Stephen Harris
wrote:
> But space is running out; I wondering if the new 3Tb disks would work
> in this scenario; most importantly will 2.6.18-238.9.1.el5PAE see the
> whole disk?  And also whether I need to be worried about 4Kbyte sectors.
You'll have to change to GPT partitioning to use >2TB; for instance:
++++++++++
[root at www ~]# uname -srvmpio
Linux 2.6.32-131.2.1.el6.i686 #1 SMP Wed May 18 07:07:27 EDT 2011 i686 i686 i386
GNU/Linux
[root at www ~]# parted /dev/sdn print
Model: DGC RAID 5 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdn: 6893GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name     Flags
 1      1049kB  6893GB  6893GB  ext4         lomover

[root at www ~]# 
+++++++++++

You will need to align your partitions to the 4KB sector boundaries; parted is
doing this automatically these days; not sure about C5, though, as I don't
currently have a LUN on a storage group with a hardware (non-VMware) C5 i686 box
(using VMware ESX 3.5U5 limits LUNs to 2TB, so can't test there).  The above
machine is a real RHEL 6.1 box on an i686 processor system (dual Intel Xeon
2.8GHz; generation prior to EM64T's introduction).  Works fine, just have to
remember to partition GPT.

On 6/18/2011 8:00 PM, Stephen Harris wrote:
>
> I wondering if the new 3Tb disks would work in this scenario;
I've tried 3 TB disks on a 32-bit CentOS 5 box, plugged into generic 
Intel PIIX on-board SATA ports.  It seemed to work fine.

I only did it to see if it would work, so I currently have no systems 
deployed like that.  Everything using 3 TB disks in production right now 
does so via a 3ware RAID controller.  The big gotcha there is that only 
their newest controllers (9700 series) support 3 TB disks.